It was hard to find anyone left standing--much less standing tall--after the government's strange case against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee came crashing to the ground last week. No one was bleeding so heavily as the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, whose top agent recanted some of his testimony against the 60-year-old Los Alamos engineer. But there was rubble everywhere you looked. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security lapses at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. Rescue workers were still searching for Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder, who were trying to explain why they had suddenly agreed to drop 58 of 59 charges against a man once accused of stealing the "crown jewels" of America's nuclear arsenal. When master survivalist Bill Clinton came out of hiding, it was to confide to reporters that he had "always had reservations" about some aspects of the case--words that recalled the way he ducked responsibility for the Waco fiasco in 1993.
And though the neighbors in White Rock, N.M., just down the road from Los Alamos, put out flags last Wednesday and welcomed Lee home with a big backyard party on Barcelona Avenue, the man at the center of the wreckage still has a lot of explaining to do. Lee won back his freedom only after pleading guilty to a single felony count of mishandling national-defense information, which means he downloaded the equivalent of 400,000 pages of classified data about the U.S. nuclear-weapons program onto an unsecured computer system and then transferred them to high-volume cassettes. Lee had refused to spell out why he spent an estimated 40 hours over 70 days downloading all that data, what he did with much of it or why he tried repeatedly to enter a restricted area after losing his security clearance--once, around 3:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve. As part of his plea agreement, Lee promised to explain everything to investigators. He will never again be able to vote, however, or serve on a jury.
But the real damage from the Lee case isn't the leaks from porous national labs or the mystery of secrets that got away. Instead, the case makes it harder to believe that in America at least, the government will always ensure that the punishment fits the crime. After last week, it's almost reasonable to ask whether federal agents cut corners on all their cases or just the ones involving Chinese Americans and national security. "Most federal cases are well founded and ethically prosecuted," says John Barrett, a former U.S. prosecutor who teaches law at St. John's University in New York City. "But Wen Ho Lee now stands in the place of every defendant who claims to be wrongly charged or wrongly overcharged. That's a good climate for a defense attorney and an unfortunate one for the country."